| Columbus Murals | |
| Wikidata: | Q96375310 |
| Artist: | Luigi Gregori |
| Year: | 1882 - 1884 |
| City: | Notre Dame, IN |
| Owner: | University of Notre Dame |
The Columbus Murals are a series of twelve murals depicting Christopher Columbus, painted in the 1880s by Luigi Gregori and displayed in the Main Building at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US. The murals have been a source of controversy in recent decades for their romanticized portrayal of Columbus and his relationship with Native Americans.
University founder Edward Sorin commissioned Gregori, an Italian artist who had previously worked for the Vatican, to paint the series, which he completed from 1881 to 1884. Columbus was chosen as the subject because he was seen by Americans as a heroic figure at the time, particularly by Catholics who were facing Anti-Catholic sentiment. As such, Columbus is painted in a saintly manner, while the natives are shown as submissive and filled with awe. In recent decades, however, the murals have faced criticism for their historical inaccuracies and prominent position in Notre Dame's primary administration building, and in September 2020 they were covered with removable prints showing local flora and fauna.
In 1874, founder and former university president Edward Sorin visited the Vatican and hired Luigi Gregori, an artist-in-residence there, to be an art professor at Notre Dame. An 1879 fire destroyed the campus's Main Building, but it was rebuilt during that summer; two years later, Sorin commissioned Gregori to create a collection of artwork to decorate the first floor of the new Main Building.
In the nineteenth century, Americans thought of Columbus as a heroic figure and a symbol of independence, progress, and faith, which went along with the manifest destiny movement. Columbus was also an appealing figure to Notre Dame's faithful population, as Catholics had rallied behind him as a rare Catholic contributor to the mostly Protestant history of the US. The figure also helped fight the nineteenth-century nativism movement, particularly against Italian Americans, and anti-Catholic sentiment—stemming from the view that Catholics were loyal to the pope before their country.
Gregori began the first painting, called Christopher Columbus, Explorer, in mid-November 1881 and finished it before the end of the year. He painted the other eleven murals from 1882 to 1884, completing each one as funds were donated by faculty and other private individuals. He used pigment with casein paint to do his work on the plaster walls. However, the plaster was dry, so they are not true frescoes.
At the time, scholars disputed Columbus's physical appearance, and no authoritative portrait existed, so Gregori used then-current president Thomas E. Walsh as the model for Columbus's face in all but one mural and Sorin for Columbus on his deathbed. Notre Dame faculty, Congregation of Holy Cross members, benefactors, and Gregori himself also served as models for other people in the murals.
Contemporary accounts and descriptions of the murals are complimentary and reflect the positive image of Columbus. An account in the New York Freeman's Journal, published in 1886 in the Notre Dame Scholastic, says that "some of [the] students are young and careless; but the pictures are treated with respect, almost with reverence, and no boyish hand has attempted to deface the walls".
In honor of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the Columbian Issue, a set of sixteen commemorative postage stamps, was created, and the 10¢ stamp was based on The Reception at Court mural.
The murals are each tall, ranging in width from 5.5to. They are all located in a hallway south of the central rotunda of the Main Building. The twelve paintings are:
The murals portray Columbus in a saintly light, and Gregori painted scenes showing Columbus as doing God's work. The Reception at Court depicts Columbus presenting treasures of the New World to King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I of Spain: pineapples, nuts, spices, gold figurines, a parrot, as well as several Taíno people. The presence of a large number of clergy indicates that the natives are to be baptized. A large crowd watches behind them, and in the background is a fleet of ships.
There are numerous historical inaccuracies in the murals. In The Reception at Court, for example, the natives are depicted holding shields which northern Plains Indians would use and wearing Mandan clothes, whereas Columbus actually encountered the Taíno of the Caribbean. The inaccuracies are attributed to a combination of ignorance (at the time, Native Americans were seen as a monolithic group, rather than a diverse group of tribes) and intentional symbolism (Notre Dame's founding Holy Cross missionaries encountered Plains Natives). Furthermore, Gregori may have drawn inspiration from Notre Dame's own collection of artifacts.
A group of Indigenous students were the first to campaign for the murals' removal in the 1970s. The 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage two decades later resurfaced protests against the pieces,[1] and in 1997, a faculty committee created a brochure to offer historical context to the murals, saying that "the University of Notre Dame recognizes that the Columbus murals reflect 19th-century white European views of race, gender and ethnicity which may be offensive to some individuals".
A 2017 letter to the editor of Notre Dame's student newspaper, The Observer, signed by over 300 students, employees, and alumni, called for the murals to be removed. In January 2019, university president John I. Jenkins announced a plan to cover the murals. In September 2020, the paintings were covered with fabric decorated to resemble tapestries of plants and animals, although the coverings can be removed for faculty and other uses.[2]